Skip to main content

Hot Mess

Interesting post about projecting a hot-mess persona to be a successful yet relate-able woman. This made me think of a boss I had for sometime - H. When I first met her, I thought she was sharp as as tack that could run circles around most people her level and higher. It made sense she was where she was in her career. 

Over time, I learned other things about her - she could be a control-freak, act like a diva, attack people like we were still in kindergarten and fighting over who got on the swing-set first. She integrated these aspects of her personality seamlessly with her razor-sharp professional one. Those of us who worked with her were in a permanent state of vigilance, we never knew what would happen next, so we remained in high-alert mode. That was her preferred management style and apparently also the strategy to come across a hot mess. 

By and large, Hot Messes haven’t merely weathered the ebbs and flows of their professional lot in life; with varying combinations of grit, talent, vision, and luck, they’ve actually managed to thrive. They tend to have relatively privileged upbringings. But even if they grew up in five-bedroom McMansions with parents who could pay the sum total of their college tuitions (biographical details they’ll reveal over their dead bodies, thank you), their successes were neither handed to them nor presumed. Sure, they may have had a leg up, but they didn’t squander it. And they were always just a little weird.

That sounds like it was written after spending a year joined in the hip with H. I think the author has me convinced she may be on to something with her hot mess theory.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...